If UAPs Are Real, What Is Their Objective?

The New Government Openness: From AATIP to AARO

For decades, the subject of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, was a staple of popular culture and official government denial. The topic was largely relegated to the fringes, dismissed by serious policy-makers and national security professionals. That reality has fundamentally changed. Beginning in 2017, a series of revelations, authorized video releases, and new legislation has dragged the subject from the shadows into the formal, bureaucratic light of Washington. The conversation is no longer about “little green men.” It’s about a persistent, data-driven national security problem that the U.S. government is now mandated by law to investigate.

The modern story of this shift begins not with a bang, but with a classified, legislatively-driven budget item. In 2007, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) quietly began an effort known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. Initiated by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the program was unclassified but unpublicized. Senator Reid, at the urging of his friend, Nevada billionaire and governmental contractor Robert Bigelow, secured $22 million in funding for the program over five years.

AATIP’s scope was, by today’s standards, extraordinarily speculative. While its official title suggested a focus on “foreign advanced aerospace threats”, the program’s output, managed through a contract to Bigelow’s private organization, was far more exotic. AATIP funded and published 38 theoretical research studies. The list of research titles released by the DIA gives a clear window into the program’s perspective. It wasn’t just studying advanced drones; it was funding papers on “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions,” “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy,” and “spacetime metric engineering”.

This reveals a foundational assumption of the AATIP program: the phenomena being observed were potentially so far beyond known physics that conventional explanations were insufficient. The program was, in effect, trying to reverse-engineer a hypothetical, interstellar-capable physics from a handful of unexplained observations.

AATIP is also credited with developing and formalizing a key piece of terminology used to this day: the “five observables” framework. This framework, which will be detailed later, became the primary tool for analysts and pilots to categorize and triage reports of objects that demonstrated seemingly “impossible” flight characteristics.

According to the Department of Defense (DoD), AATIP’s funding was ended in 2012. However, this was not the end of the U.S. government’s involvement. Reporting, and later official acknowledgments, confirmed that the effort simply continued under different names and organizations. This led to the formation of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (UAPTF), a program within the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

The UAPTF’s work marked the true turning point, as it was this body that was tasked by Congress to produce a formal, unclassified intelligence assessment. On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) delivered that “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” to Congress. This nine-page report was a watershed moment. For the first time, the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense jointly and publicly stated that UAP were real, that they represented a serious concern, and that, for the most part, they remained unexplained.

The 2021 ODNI report, itself a response to a provision in the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act, triggered an avalanche of new legislative action. Congress, now formally appraised of a problem that the DoD and Intelligence Community (IC) could not explain, moved to create a permanent, accountable, and data-driven office.

This effort culminated in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2022. This law mandated the creation of a new, single-point-of-contact office for the entire U.S. government on the UAP issue. In July 2022, the DoD officially announced the establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO.

AARO’s creation marks the final, and most significant, shift in this story. The mission has changed. AATIP was a small, semi-secret, theoretical physics-oriented program asking, “How might interstellar travel work?”. AARO is a large, public-facing, and Congressionally-overseen office tasked with a much more pragmatic and urgent national security mission: to “minimize technical and intelligence surprise”.

AARO’s mission, synchronized across the entire DoD and IC, is “to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest” and “mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security”. This includes anomalous, unidentified objects in all domains: “space, airborne, submerged and transmedium”.

This bureaucratic evolution from AATIP to AARO is not just a change in acronyms. It represents a fundamental shift in U.S. policy. The UAP subject has been fully “promoted” from a fringe, speculative science problem to a formal, acknowledged, and resourced national security threat. The U.S. government has moved from asking “what if” to asking “what is it, who owns it, and what are we going to do about it?”

The Official Assessment: A ‘Domain Awareness Gap’

The U.S. government’s official, unclassified position on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) is one of agnostic concern, driven primarily by a significant lack of quality data. The core problem, as defined by the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community, is not that we are being visited by hostile forces, but that our national defense systems are being routinely penetrated by objects we cannot identify. The UAP issue is, in official terms, a critical “domain awareness gap”.

This position was first codified in the landmark 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment. That report, which analyzed 144 UAP reports from U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021, reached a stark and unsettling primary conclusion: “Limited Data Leaves Most UAP Unexplained”.

Of the 144 reports analyzed, the UAP Task Force was able to identify only one with “high confidence”. The explanation for that single resolved case was a “large, deflating balloon”. All other 143 reports remained in the “unexplained” category. This comically mundane finding, set against a backdrop of 143 “unknowns,” perfectly encapsulates the government’s data problem. The report’s authors were not saying the objects were mysterious; they were saying the data was insufficient to draw any firm conclusions at all.

This lack of data did not prevent the ODNI from formally identifying two clear and present risks posed by the phenomena:

1. A Hazard to Flight Safety: UAP “pose a hazard to safety of flight”. These are not just blurry lights; they are physical objects operating in military and civilian airspace. The 2021 report stated that the UAPTF had “11 reports of documented instances in which pilots reported near misses with a UAP”. This fact alone makes UAP an urgent, non-negotiable issue for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the DoD.
2. A Potential National Security Challenge: This is the DoD’s primary concern. The ODNI report states that UAP “would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms”. Even more troubling is the possibility that UAP “provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology”.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established to solve this very problem. AARO’s official mission brief explicitly states that “UAP are primarily attributable to domain-awareness gaps”. In essence, UAP are a symptom of a larger intelligence failure: the inability to monitor, detect, and identify all objects in U.S. airspace, from the surface of the ocean to the vacuum of space.

This “gap” is not a theoretical vulnerability. It was exposed in dramatic fashion in early 2023 with the incursion of a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon. Following that incident, Pentagon officials, including the commander of NORAD, General Glen VanHerck, publicly admitted to a “domain awareness gap”. They explained that the military’s vast sensor network had been calibrated to filter out slow-moving objects, like balloons or birds, to prevent overwhelming operators with “clutter.” China, it seems, had learned to exploit this filter. Many objects that were previously classified as “UAP” were, in retrospect, likely part of this adversary balloon program.

This revelation reframes the entire UAP problem from the Pentagon’s perspective. The “UAP” category has, for years, been an all-encompassing “junk drawer” for sensor contacts that were not immediately identifiable as a traditional aircraft or missile. This drawer co-mingled multiple, distinct categories of objects:

• Airborne Clutter: Prosaic objects like weather balloons, plastic bags, and birds.
• Sensor Anomalies: “Ghosts” in the machine created by sensor malfunctions or software artifacts.
• Adversary Platforms: Identifiable, but often stealthy, foreign collection systems, such as Chinese surveillance drones or balloons.
• The “Anomalous” Residue: A small, persistent core of objects – like the 2004 “Tic Tac” – that appear to demonstrate truly “anomalous” flight characteristics.

AARO’s primary, day-to-day job is data triage: to sort this “junk drawer.” The Chinese balloon incident proved that this was not a fringe, academic exercise, but an immediate and exploitable national security failure.

From this perspective, the UAP issue became the perfect bureaucratic lever for the DoD to secure the resources and political will needed to fix its much broader sensor-filtering and data-fusion problems. The sudden government “openness” on UAP is not about preparing the public for an otherworldly revelation. It’s about building a consensus to fund and deploy the next generation of sensors – like AARO’s new “GREMLIN” sensor suite – to ensure that nothing operates in U.S.-controlled domains without being identified.

The official government stance is one of pragmatic and data-driven agnosticism. It is not that “aliens” are a threat. It is that “unknowns” are a threat. And for the last 70 years, the UAP problem has been the largest and most persistent “unknown” in the national security-space.

AARO’s Historical Review and the Prosaic Explanation

While AARO’s primary mission is to identify and mitigate current threats, it was also given a unique, secondary task by Congress: to look backward. In the FY 2023 NDAA, Congress mandated that AARO produce a “Historical Record Report” (HRR) detailing the U.S. government’s involvement with UAP since 1945.

This mandate was a direct response to decades of public speculation and, more recently, explosive testimony from high-level whistleblowers. These individuals alleged that elements within the U.S. government have been concealing evidence of “non-human” technology, including retrieved craft and “biologics,” for decades, all without Congressional oversight.

In March 2024, AARO released Volume I of this Historical Record Report. The 63-page document is, in effect, the U.S. government’s official, systematic counter-narrative to this entire history of “UFO-logy.” Its conclusions are blunt, unambiguous, and, for AARO, definitive.

The report’s top-line finding, stated with high confidence, is that “AARO has found no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting has represented extraterrestrial activity”.

Furthermore, the report states that AARO “has found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology”. It also directly addresses the “cover-up” allegations, finding “no indications that any information was illegally or inappropriately withheld from Congress”.

This report directly confronts the whistleblower allegations of secret “reverse-engineering” programs. AARO’s assessment is that all such named and described programs “either do not exist,” are “misidentified authentic, highly sensitive national security programs,” or resolve to “an unwarranted and disestablished program” (like the proposed, but never funded, “Kona Blue”).

This “misidentification” thesis is the core of AARO’s historical rebuttal. The report does not necessarily accuse witnesses or whistleblowers of fabrication. Instead, it suggests they are mistaken. AARO assesses that claims of hidden alien programs “are largely the result of circular reporting in which a small group of individuals have repeated inaccurate claims they have heard from others”. The report suggests that individuals who claimed to have knowledge of “off-world” programs were, in fact, simply misinterpreting authentic (but conventional) classified U.S. programs they had heard about.

AARO then applies this “misidentification” model to the most famous historical UAP cases, effectively “resolving” them as U.S. technology.

• The 1947 Roswell Incident: The report reiterates the 1990s Air Force finding that the “Roswell Incident” was not a UAP event. The recovered materials were consistent with a balloon from the “then-classified Project Mogul”.
• Cold War Sightings: The report asserts that “some portion of UAP sightings” from the 1940s through the 1970s were “most likely” observations of experimental U.S. aircraft, such as the V-173 “Flying Pancake,” the high-altitude U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, and the HAVE Blue/F-117A stealth fighter.

In essence, the AARO HRR argues that the U.S. government was covering something up, but it wasn’t aliens. It was its own most advanced, secret aerospace technology.

AARO extends this “prosaic” model to its analysis of current UAP reports. The 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, which covers the period from May 2023 to June 2024, noted that AARO’s total caseload had grown to over 1,600 reports. AARO’s director, Jon Kosloski, stated that the office has “successfully resolved hundreds of cases”.

The explanations for these resolved modern cases are identical to the 2021 report’s single “balloon” finding. They are “commonplace objects”. The list of culprits includes “balloons, birds, drones, satellites and aircraft”. One AARO report noted that 70% of its recently closed cases were attributed to balloons.

The other major category of prosaic explanation is “sensor anomalies”. AARO’s own public case files, released on its website, demonstrate this analytical process. In one case from 2022, “anomalous propulsion signatures” were reported by a UAV operator. AARO’s analysis concluded with “high confidence” that this “was the result of a sensor artifact”.

This reveals AARO’s two-front “UAP problem.” On one front, it’s a data-management problem, dealing with a modern flood of low-quality sensor data, which it is successfully “resolving” as balloons, drones, and sensor noise. On the other front, it’s a narrative-management problem, tasked with countering decades of “lore” and, more pointedly, the specific allegations of recent whistleblowers. The Historical Record Report is the primary tool for this second task. It is the official, on-the-record “great debunk,” designed to reset the public narrative and re-center the UAP conversation on solvable, terrestrial explanations.

Defining the Anomaly: The ‘Five Observables’

Despite AARO’s success in resolving hundreds of cases as prosaic clutter, a “small, stubborn subset” of reports continues to resist easy explanation. The 2021 ODNI report left 143 of 144 cases “unexplained”. AARO’s own leadership, while stressing the prosaic nature of the majority of reports, has been careful to acknowledge this persistent, anomalous core.

The first AARO director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that “only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as ‘anomalous'”. His successor, Jon Kosloski, reiterated this, stating that “only a very small percentage of reports… are potentially anomalous”. AARO’s 2024 report noted that “21 cases merited further analysis” based on “reported anomalous characteristics,” and over 900 reports simply “lack sufficient scientific data” to be resolved at all.

This “anomalous” category is the true UAP problem. These are the reports that keep the issue on the national security agenda. But what, exactly, is an “anomalous” signature?

The U.S. government uses a specific framework for this, first developed by the AATIP program. It’s known as the “Five Observables.” This framework provides a common language for pilots, sensor operators, and intelligence analysts to triage reports and identify the characteristics that, if verified, would represent a “breakthrough… technology”.

The Five Observables are a set of flight characteristics and behaviors, reported by credible witnesses and sometimes captured on sensors, that appear to “defy the laws of physics” as we know them. They are:

1. Anti-Gravity Lift (or Positive-Lift): This describes the ability of an object to fly or hover motionlessly in the atmosphere without any visible means of propulsion. Reports describe craft with no wings, no engines, no exhaust plumes, and no sound (like rotor wash or a jet engine). They simply float, seemingly unaffected by gravity.
2. Instantaneous Acceleration: This is the “sudden and instantaneous” ability to accelerate from a complete standstill to thousands of miles per hour “in the blink of an eye”. This also includes the ability to make sudden, extreme maneuvers – such as 90-degree turns – at high speed. These maneuvers, if performed by a conventional craft, would generate G-forces (acceleration loads) that would instantly kill a human pilot and tear the airframe itself apart.
3. Hypersonic Velocities (Without Signatures): This is the ability to travel at “hypersonic” speeds (above Mach 5) within the Earth’s atmosphere, but without the expected physical signatures. At such speeds, air friction should heat a craft to a “red-hot” glow, and the craft should produce a violent sonic boom. These objects are reported to do neither.
4. Low Observability (or Cloaking): This describes an object’s “elusive” quality, or its ability to “hide” from sensors. This can manifest in several ways: an object is seen by the naked eye but doesn’t appear on radar; or it’s tracked on radar but remains invisible; or it appears “cloaked” or “blurry” to advanced targeting pods.
5. Transmedium Travel: This is the ability of a single craft to move seamlessly and effectively between different physical domains. This includes travel from the vacuum of space, into the atmosphere, and directly into the ocean, all without a loss of performance or a change in the craft’s design. A conventional aircraft is designed for air; a submarine is designed for water. These objects are reported to treat both as the same.

The following table summarizes these five defining characteristics of an anomalous UAP.

The “Five Observables,” taken together, describe a technology that is not just an “advanced drone.” They describe a physics that we do not understand. Any one of these capabilities, as former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo (associated with AATIP) has stated, would be a “game-changer” for a foreign adversary. An object demonstrating all five implies a unified propulsion and energy system (like the “spacetime metric engineering” AATIP studied) that is far beyond any known terrestrial capability.

This creates the central conflict at the heart of the UAP issue. AARO’s official report states there is “no evidence” of non-terrestrial technology. And yet, the military’s own expert witnesses – its “Top Gun” pilots – are filing official reports describing objects that demonstrate all five of these “impossible” characteristics.

The “Five Observables” are the battleground. They represent the data that resists the prosaic explanation. They are the definition of the problem set that AARO must either solve with new physics, attribute to a “breakthrough” adversary technology, or, as their reports suggest, dismiss as a “sensor anomaly” or a “human observational and interpretive error”.

Case Study: The 2004 Nimitz ‘Tic Tac’ Encounter

If the “Five Observables” are the “what,” the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter is the “who” and “when.” It is the “type specimen” for a truly anomalous UAP, a “gold standard” case that brought the issue out of Cold War history and into the 21st-century military. It is, by all accounts, the single most credible and inexplicable event in the modern public record.

The encounter took place in November 2004, off the coast of Southern California. The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (CVN-68) was conducting routine pre-deployment training exercises. For several days leading up to the main event, the USS Princeton, an advanced Aegis-class cruiser in the strike group, had been detecting “unidentified aerial objects” on its sophisticated radar system. These objects, which the operators couldn’t identify, were “moving erratically” and exhibiting advanced flight capabilities.

On November 14, 2004, the Commanding Officer of Strike Fighter Squadron Forty-One, Commander David Fravor, was scheduled to lead a 2-v-2 air-to-air training exercise. He was a graduate of the “Top Gun” naval flight school and a highly experienced aviator. He and his wingwoman, Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, were in their F/A-18F Super Hornets when the Princeton’s controller diverted them to intercept one of these unknown radar contacts.

When they arrived at the target location, they initially saw nothing. But looking down at the ocean, Fravor reported seeing a strange disturbance on the otherwise calm sea, like “whitewater” or an area of “boiling” water, as if something large was just beneath the surface.

Hovering erratically just above this disturbance, “like a Ping-Pong ball,” was a “strange, white, oval-shaped object”. It had no wings, no engines, no exhaust, and no visible propulsion. It was, as it quickly became known, the “Tic Tac”.

Fravor descended in his F-18 to get a closer look. As he did, the Tic Tac “mirrored” his jet’s movements, ascending to meet him. Fravor then made an aggressive “cut-in” maneuver to try and “get behind” the object. At that moment, the object “demonstrated rapid acceleration,” moving in ways that “defied the laws of physics”. It vanished. In his 2023 testimony under oath before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Fravor stated unequivocally, “the technology that we faced was far superior than anything that we had”. He later added, “I wanted to fly it”.

The encounter didn’t end there. After Fravor and Dietrich returned to the Nimitz, a second flight crew was launched with an ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared) pod. This crew managed to acquire the object on their sensors, capturing the now-famous “FLIR” video. The 90-second video shows the object, confirms its “Tic Tac” shape, and captures it accelerating “off-screen” at a speed that astonished the operators.

Scientific analysis of the encounter, based on the combined radar data from the Princeton, the F-18s, the FLIR video, and Fravor’s “four sets of eyes” testimony, has attempted to quantify the object’s performance. The results are startling. Published analyses estimate the object’s accelerations at “lower bounds” of “almost 100 g to 1000s of gs”. Another analysis calculated a mean acceleration of 550 g. To put this in perspective, a trained fighter pilot can withstand about 9 gs for a few seconds. The Tic Tac achieved this “impossible” acceleration with “no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms, and no evidence of excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies”.

The Nimitz “Tic Tac” encounter is the single most powerful rebuttal to the purely prosaic explanation model. It cannot be dismissed as a “balloon,” as it out-maneuvered and out-accelerated an F/A-18F. It cannot be dismissed as a “sensor anomaly,” as it was tracked simultaneously by the Princeton’s SPY-1 radar, the F-18’s APG-73 radar, the ATFLIR pod, and, most important, the “four sets of eyes” of two expert pilots.

This case is the perfect incarnation of the “Five Observables”:

• Anti-Gravity Lift: It hovered, wingless, over the “whitewater”.
• Instantaneous Acceleration: It “shot out of a rifle”, accelerating from a hover to vanishing in seconds, pulling hundreds of Gs.
• Hypersonic Velocity: Its radar track and visual disappearance imply speeds far beyond known aircraft.
• Low Observability: It was a featureless white “Tic Tac”.
• Transmedium Travel: The sighting began over a “whitewater” disturbance, strongly implying the object had either just exited the water or was coordinating with a submerged object.

The Nimitz encounter is the “anomalous” data set. It is the “small percentage” that AARO’s directors acknowledge exists. It is the core, unexplained data point that resists resolution and keeps the UAP topic at the center of the national security conversation.

Case Study: The 2015 Roosevelt ‘Gimbal’ and ‘GoFast’ Encounters

If the 2004 Nimitz “Tic Tac” incident represents the “gold standard” of a truly anomalous UAP, the 2014-2015 encounters from the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group represent the confusion at the heart of the UAP problem. These two videos, “Gimbal” and “GoFast,” have become just as famous as the “FLIR” video, but they are the “gold standard” for a very different reason: they are almost certainly prosaic misidentifications.

These incidents highlight the critical tension between compelling, “anomalous” pilot testimony and the cold, “prosaic” analysis of sensor data.

The setting was 2014-2015, off the U.S. East Coast. Pilots from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, including former Navy pilot Ryan Graves (who later testified before Congress), reported “frequently” encountering strange objects in their training airspace. Graves described “fleets” of objects that could remain stationary in hurricane-force winds or accelerate to supersonic speeds. The pilots were convinced these were not “birds or weather balloons” and represented a new, highly advanced technology.

Two videos from these encounters, captured by F/A-18 targeting pods, were eventually declassified and released by the Pentagon.

The “GIMBAL” Video (2015): This 35-second infrared video shows a “flying saucer” shaped object. The pilots are clearly baffled, with one exclaiming, “Look at that thing… It’s rotating!”. The object appears to make a controlled, “gimbal-like” rotation, reinforcing its exotic appearance.

• The Prosaic Explanation: Detailed analysis by skeptics and sensor experts provides a compelling, terrestrial explanation. The object itself is not rotating. The object is likely a distant plane, and what the pilots are seeing is the “infrared glare of the engines”. The apparent “rotation” is a “sensor artifact”. It’s the camera’s gimbal mechanism (the mount that allows the camera to swivel) rotating to keep the object centered, and this rotation is captured in the glare of the IR image. The “aura” or “glow” around the object is also not an “alien warp drive”; it’s a common “unsharp mask” filter, a standard image-sharpening artifact.

The “GOFAST” Video (2015): This 35-second video shows a small, round object that appears to be “skimming the water” at an incredible speed. The pilots are again amazed, with one saying, “What the f— is that?”.

• The Prosaic Explanation: This is a classic, textbook example of a “parallax effect”. The on-screen data from the ATFLIR pod, which shows the F-18’s altitude (high) and the object’s range (distant), allows for a simple calculation. The object is not low and fast. It is high (likely a balloon or bird) and moving slowly(calculated at around 30-40 mph). It appears to be “going fast” because the F-18 and its targeting pod are moving rapidly, creating an optical illusion of speed against the very distant ocean surface.

These two cases perfectly demonstrate AARO’s entire thesis. They are misidentifications of “airborne clutter” and “sensor anomalies”.

This highlights the central dilemma of UAP analysis: who do you trust? Do you trust the human witnesses – expert “Top Gun” pilots like Ryan Graves, who insist they saw “fleets” of objects performing impossible maneuvers for days on end? Or do you trust the sensor data from these specific, isolated videos, which, upon objective analysis, points to a mundane bird and a distant jet?

The witnesses insist the videos show only the “tip of the iceberg” and fail to capture the truly anomalous events they saw with their own eyes. The analysts insist the videos are the event, and they are not anomalous.

It’s easy to see why AARO and the DoD would publicize and declassify these videos. They are the perfect “resolvable” cases. They are famous “UFO” videos that AARO can explain with “rigorous scientific framework”. They are Exhibit A and Exhibit B for AARO’s core message: “We are using science and coming up with answers”, and those answers are “commonplace objects”. By prosaically resolving “Gimbal” and “GoFast,” AARO builds a “track record of resolution” that reinforces its Historical Record Report and its entire “prosaic” worldview.

Analysis of UAP Mission Hypotheses

Having established what has been reported, what the government’s official explanation is, and what the “anomalous” data looks like, we can now turn to the core question: Why?

If we set aside the “prosaic” majority of cases (balloons, birds, sensor artifacts) and focus only on the “small percentage” of truly anomalous reports – the “Tic Tac” class of objects that demonstrate the “Five Observables” – we can analyze their patterns of behavior to hypothesize potential missions, objectives, and goals.

This analysis is not speculative; it is a data-driven “indications analysis” based on the patterns of where, when, and how these objects appear. The behaviors are not random. They are targeted, persistent, and intelligent.

Hypothesis One: Strategic Reconnaissance of Military Capabilities

The most direct, evidence-based, and least exotic hypothesis is that anomalous UAP are engaged in a long-term, sophisticated mission of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) against U.S. (and likely other nations’) advanced military assets.

This hypothesis is strongly supported by AARO’s own data. AARO “continues to see a density of UAP reports near U.S. military assets and sensors”. The 2022 ODNI report noted that UAP “continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace”. This clustering around sensitive military zones is the primary reason the ODNI identified “potential adversary collection activity” as a “possible concern”.

The 2004 Nimitz and 2015 Roosevelt encounters are the key evidence. These objects were not sighted by random civilians in their backyards. They were “intruding on Navy strike groups” during “pre-planned training” or “tests”. A carrier strike group is one of the most powerful and technologically advanced projections of national power on Earth.

The timing of the Nimitz encounter is the most compelling data point. The strike group was not just on a routine patrol; it was integrating and testing its newly upgraded “Cooperative Engagement Capability” (CEC). This is a cutting-edge “datalink and sensor fusion technology” that networks all the ships and aircraft in the group into a single, cohesive sensor “brain.”

The appearance of the “Tic Tac” at that exact moment and in that exact location is highly unlikely to be a coincidence. It strongly suggests a mission to test the capabilities, detection limits, and response times of the U.S. Navy’s most advanced sensor-fusion systems. The UAP’s behavior – “mirroring” Fravor, evading intercept, and then appearing at his pre-planned “CAP point” – was an active probing of the fleet’s “eyes,” “ears,” and tactical procedures.

This hypothesis leads to the “adversary tech dilemma”: who is conducting this reconnaissance?

1. Secret U.S. Tech: This is the “domestic” hypothesis. It posits the UAP are a “black project” from the U.S. “skunk works”, and the mission is a “red team” test against the Navy. The argument for this is that it’s the only way to test your secret technology in a real-world, multi-sensor environment. The argument against it is the sheer level of technology displayed (the “Five Observables”) and the question of why you would “taunt” your own pilots.
2. Adversary Tech (China/Russia): This is the DoD’s nightmare scenario, and the “national security challenge” the ODNI warned about. This would mean a competitor has achieved a “breakthrough” technology. However, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe stated that intelligence analysts had “high confidence” that the “Tic Tac” was not foreign adversary tech. The reason: the technology it demonstrated was simply too far advanced.
3. Non-Human Tech: This becomes the default hypothesis if options 1 and 2 are ruled out.

Regardless of who is piloting the craft, the mission is clear. The behavior is not random. It is targeted, persistent, and focused on the U.S. military’s most advanced strategic assets. It is a classic ISR pattern.

Hypothesis Two: A Focused Survey of Nuclear and Atomic Capabilities

This is perhaps the most specific, well-documented, and unsettling UAP mission pattern. The evidence suggests a central, decades-long UAP objective has been the specific monitoring, surveillance, and – in some cases – interference with nuclear weapons and atomic facilities.

This “nuclear nexus” is the single most consistent UAP pattern in the historical data. A 2023 pattern-recognition study analyzing 590 UAP reports from 1945-1975 found “Very Strong Support” for the hypothesis that “elevated UAP activity was present at atomic weapon development sites”. The study concluded that a “Focused Atomic Weapons/Warfighting Capability Survey” was the “most likely scenario” for the observed activity.

The timeline of this pattern is undeniable:

• 1947 (The Dawn of the Atomic Age): The “flying saucer” craze begins. Media coverage at the time immediately linked disc reports to atomic sites: Hanford (plutonium production), Oak Ridge (uranium enrichment), and the White Sands Proving Ground (site of the Trinity Test).
• 1947 (Roswell): The famous Roswell incident occurred near Roswell Army Airfield, which was home to the 509th Bomb Group – the world’s only atomic bomber squadron at the time.
• 1948-1951 (The “Peak”): The historical study found that the “most significant window of UAP activity” (1948-1951) “corresponded to the development and production of the first fission (nuclear) and then fusion (thermonuclear) weapons”.

This pattern is not limited to passive observation. It includes active, physical interference. The key case is the “Malmstrom UFO Incident” in March 1967.

• The Malmstrom Incident (1967): Former Air Force Captain Robert Salas, the on-duty missile combat crew commander at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, has testified repeatedly (including to AARO) about this event. Salas and his security personnel reported a “glowing red-orange object” hovering over their nuclear missile silo (Echo Flight).
• The Effect: As this object hovered, Salas’s 10 Minuteman nuclear ICBMs “suddenly became inoperative”. They were “disabled”. Similar events were reported at other nuclear missile facilities.

This incident, and the decades of sworn testimony supporting it, has now met AARO’s official counter-narrative. The AARO Historical Record Report acknowledges interviewing personnel about these “UAP disruptions to ICBM operations”. However, a 2025 Pentagon report (cited in media) revealed a new, official explanation: the 1967 Malmstrom incident “had been caused by a classified test of an electromagnetic pulse device”.

This creates an irreconcilable conflict between decades of consistent, sworn testimony from multiple officers and a brand new (as of 2025) prosaic explanation from the Pentagon.

This “nuclear nexus” pattern is so persistent that it has been codified into law. The FY 2022 NDAA, which established AARO, legally requires the office to include in its annual report “the number of reported incidents… of unidentified aerial phenomena… associated with nuclear power generating stations, nuclear fuel storage sites, or other sites or facilities regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”.

This hypothesis reveals a critical escalation in mission behavior. The Nimitz encounter (Hypothesis One) was passive probing. The Malmstrom encounter was active interference. Disabling 10 nuclear-armed ICBMs has no “scientific” value. It has military and political value. As researcher Robert Hastings, who has interviewed over 120 veterans about these incidents, suggests, this action can only be interpreted as a warning or a demonstration of capability. This implies a “mission objective” not of simple observation, but of actively demonstrating control over humanity’s most destructive technology.

Hypothesis Three: Environmental or Scientific Sampling

This hypothesis reframes the entire phenomenon. It posits that the UAP mission is not military or human-centric at all. The mission is scientific, focused on the systematic, long-term sampling and analysis of Earth’s biosphere (its atmosphere, oceans, and geology), and our military assets are merely “noise” in the data.

This hypothesis is built from the “Transmedium Travel” observable. The U.S. government explicitly recognizes this. AARO’s foundational definition of UAP is not limited to the air; it includes “transmedium objects or devices” and “submerged objects or devices”.

The data strongly supports this focus. Some researchers, cited in reporting, estimate that “Fifty percent of UFO encounters are connected with oceans” and “Fifteen more – with lakes”. This has given rise to the term “Unidentified Submersible Objects,” or USOs.

The “gold standard” Nimitz “Tic Tac” encounter began with the object hovering over a “whitewater” or “boiling” patch of ocean. This is a powerful indicator of a transmedium origin point, suggesting the object had just exited the water or was operating in tandem with a submerged component.

This reframes the entire problem. We call them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, but that may just be an observation bias. We are an air-breathing species that lives on land. We only notice these objects when they enter our domain. This may, in fact, be a primarily Oceanic or Submersible phenomenon that we are only capturing in its “aerial” phase.

If this is true, the “mission” is not military; it’s environmental science. The “Five Observables” technology is perfectly suited for a long-term, autonomous survey. Transmedium capability allows a single probe to sample the upper atmosphere, the air, and the deep ocean.

This hypothesis also reframes the “threat.” If these are autonomous scientific probes, the “threat” to aviation is not hostile, but accidental. The “11 reports of near misses” are the equivalent of a “bird strike.” The UAP is not attacking the F-18; it’s a “hazard to safety of flight” because it’s a physical object in the airspace.

This aligns perfectly with AARO’s official distinction, in its 2023 report, between a UAP “Risk” (defined as “a safety hazard… from collision”) and a UAP “Threat” (defined as demonstrating “hostile intent”). Under this hypothesis, UAP are a significant “risk,” but they have never demonstrated a “threat.”

An exotic variation of this hypothesis is the “Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis” (CTH). This posits the “intelligence” is not extraterrestrial, but is a “concealed earthly” species – perhaps a pre-human, technologically advanced civilization – that “lives underground” or, more plausibly, in the deep oceans, which remain almost entirely unexplored. In this case, the “mission” is not survey, but co-existence and territorial behavior.

Hypothesis Four: Alternative Frameworks (The ‘Control System’)

This final hypothesis is the most abstract, but it is the only one that attempts to account for the behavioral and psychological components of the phenomenon, as well as its long-term, “absurd” nature.

This hypothesis, most famously associated with the work of researcher Jacques Vallee, argues that the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) is too simple and “contradicts the hypothesis of… scientific experimentation”. Vallee notes that the number of “unexplained close encounters are far more numerous than required for any physical survey of the earth”. The behavior is often “absurd” and seems designed to be seen.

This hypothesis posits that the UAP mission is not military (to gather data) or scientific (to gather samples). The mission is psychological and sociological. The objective is not to study humanity, but to influence it.

Under this framework, the UAP phenomenon is a “control system.” It is a long-term, staged “deterrence or display” campaign, designed to influence human perception and society over millennia, without making overt, direct contact.

The “absurd” and “illogical” nature of the encounters is the point. It is a form of communication. It inserts itself into human mythology, first as “fae” or “gods,” then as “airships,” and now as “UAP.”

The “nuclear survey” (Hypothesis Two) is the strongest evidence for this. Disabling 10 ICBMs at Malmstrom is not “science” or “ISR.” It is a display. It is a non-verbal, non-contact message: “We can and will neutralize your most powerful and self-destructive weapons”. The objective is deterrence – to “warn us” that we are “playing with fire”.

The “mission” in this framework is to slowly acclimate humanity to the presence of a “non-human intelligence”. It is a “slow drip” disclosure, managed by the phenomenon itself. The goal is to avoid the “paradigm shift” that Hastings predicted, a shock that could “threaten… traditional institutions such as religions, governments, other social institutions”.

This “meta-hypothesis” is the only one that provides a “motive” (“why”) that can contain all the other observed “missions” (“what”):

• The Strategic Reconnaissance (H1) is how the “control system” monitors humanity’s technological development to know when and where to intervene.
• The Nuclear Survey (H2) is the intervention – a direct, unmistakable “display” at a critical moment (the height of the Cold War).
• The Environmental Sampling (H3) is just routine “maintenance” or curiosity for this long-standing, Earth-based “control system.”

This framework attempts to provide a single, unified motive that ties together the technology of the “Tic Tac,” the interference at Malmstrom, and the “absurd” behavioral patterns that have defined the phenomenon for centuries.

Summary

The study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena has been fundamentally transformed. It has moved from a fringe, cultural curiosity into a formal, high-priority national security and aviation safety challenge for the United States government. This shift is codified in the creation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a Congressionally-mandated body operating with the “highest scientific and intelligence-tradecraft standards”.

AARO’s official findings, articulated in its annual reports and its comprehensive Historical Record Report, are clear: the “vast majority” of UAP reports are “almost certainly” the result of misidentification. AARO has successfully resolved hundreds of cases as “prosaic objects” such as balloons, birds, drones, and airborne clutter. Many other reports have been resolved as “sensor anomalies” or artifacts of the advanced systems used to detect them. Critically, AARO states it has found “no verifiable evidence” that any UAP sighting represents “extraterrestrial activity” or that the U.S. government has concealed “off-world technology”.

Despite these resolutions, the U.S. government – from the Pentagon to NASA – continues to treat the phenomenon with high seriousness. This is because the core problem, defined by the Pentagon as a “domain awareness gap”, remains. AARO itself acknowledges that a “very small percentage” of reports display “anomalous” characteristics – a small set of cases that “merit further analysis” and a larger set of over 900 reports that “lack sufficient scientific data” to be resolved.

This small, unexplained core of the UAP dataset – typified by the 2004 “Tic Tac” encounter – is defined by the “Five Observables,” a framework describing technology that appears to defy the known laws of physics. When the patterns of these anomalous encounters are analyzed, they suggest clear, intelligent, and non-random mission objectives.

The data points to two primary hypotheses for these anomalous objects:

1. A military reconnaissance mission, focused on probing and testing the U.S. military’s most advanced sensor capabilities, particularly those of naval carrier strike groups.
2. A nuclear-focused survey mission, which has been the single most consistent UAP pattern since 1947 and has included direct interference with ICBMs.

Other hypotheses, such as environmental sampling by “Unidentified Submersible Objects” or a long-term “control system” mission to deter human self-destruction, are also supported by the behavioral data.

The UAP enigma remains a paradox. It is, according to AARO, a problem that is “almost certainly” prosaic, yet it is simultaneously treated by the Pentagon as one of the nation’s most urgent “national security challenges”. The mission, for now, is to close the “domain awareness gap” – to gather sufficient data until the “anomalous” and the “prosaic” can finally be distinguished with certainty.